Fellowship will help novelist Charlotte Wood challenge stereotypes about ageing

By Linda Morris

Updated8 May 2016 — 6:53pmfirst published 3 May 2016 — 1:54pm

Charlotte Wood's prize-winning novelThe Natural Way of Things centres on persecuted young women, set in a dystopian future. For her next book she plans to write about older women: three friends, all in their seventies or eighties, who meet up one Christmas.

It's too early in the writing process, Wood says, to predict what will happen to her women: "But I do know they are not going to be frail, little old ladies. I'm interested in what happens to the body and the mind that isn't about being a victim, and being powerless and timid and fearful.

First winner of an unusual fellowship: novelist Charlotte Wood.

Photo: Daniel Munoz

"A lot of the depictions I've seen of old people in literature is very static. We have characters whose glory days are well behind them and they are very passive and all they do is sit around and remember stuff. The old people I know, they are as interested in today and the future as I am, and possibly more so because things are more urgent."

The winner last month of the Stella Prize for writing by Australian women, Wood's interest in challenging ageist stereotypes has led to an unusual partnership with the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre.

She has won the first $100,000 Writer in Residence fellowship at the $500 million research facility established two years ago to bring together the university's departments of arts and sciences to tackle the rising prevalence of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

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As honorary associate, Wood will have access to the centre's research, library and best scientific brains over a year as she develops her manuscript, and the world-leading health and chronic disease specialists will, in turn, have access to her insights and interpretations.

New representations of ageing are needed in literature, says the centre's academic director Professor Stephen Simpson. Ceasing the medicalisation of ageing was vital.

"Age is the greatest risk factor for many diseases, of course, but science is showing how these can be prevented by diet, physical and mental activity," he says. "Lifestyle is key, not drugs."

Professor Simpson describes Wood as a superb writer. "She also has a clear affinity with what we are trying to do at the Charles Perkins Centre. Her work is challenging and at times subversive and addresses big themes."

Until four years ago Wood was a health journalist and editor. She holds strong opinions about the reasons many public health messages ultimately fail to convince.

There is a huge gap, she says, between the perceived concerns of "target populations" and the complex behaviours and motivations of real people. She put those criticisms in her application and had "zero expectations" of a call back.

"What I didn't realise when I wrote my application is that provocation is what they are all about," she says. ''The centre is approaching a whole lot of health stuff in a way that is radical.

"What they are saying is the way we have approached this [issue] hasn't worked, what we need to do is blow it all up and find unexpected connections. The really open spirit of collaboration seems to me to be quite genuine. It's really exciting."

Wood hopes to use "little droplets" of the centre's research in her writing but only so far as it permits her to write "a good book".

"What I'm doing is projecting myself forward and asking what will I be like, and what do I want, and how will I be living with the imminent approach of death?" she says.